Eight per cent of Irish people aged between eighteen and thirty report, per the findings of a widely publicised study this week, that they “feel positive about their mental wellbeing”.
The research carried out by Ipsos on behalf of the National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) found that a third of respondents “rarely or never” feel optimistic about their future.
The NYCI, like many organisations, has an element of a political agenda to its work. That means, naturally, that they are keen to use data like this to advance their own concerns to both the Government and the public. It means that in this case, it was entirely predictable that the NYCI would – not inherently unfairly – highlight the housing crisis as what it believes to be the main reason for the mass discontent. But is it as simple as imagining that if our young people could all get affordable mortgages, and if Government tackled the gender pay gap (another NWCI recommendation), and if it “enhanced rural public transport” (yet another), all would be well?
I don’t believe so.
This is not to say that economic factors do not affect a person’s happiness or wellbeing: As somebody who struggled with debt in my early twenties, after the 2008 financial crash, the impact of financial worries on a person’s wellbeing cannot be overstated. We live in a country where many couples and households are well-off on paper, but, in the words of a decidedly not-in-her-twenties friend, every day seems to come with another demand for €100 for this, or for that. Yet the fact remains that those financial burdens tend to increase as you get older, rather than when you are young: Children are expensive, cars are expensive, pets are expensive, groceries are increasingly expensive. We should not imagine that the youth are disproportionately impacted by the cost of living as opposed to people in their forties or fifties. If anything, the reverse should be true.
What is objectively true, I think, is that life for somebody in their twenties has changed beyond what most of us who are 20 years older would have recognised even two decades ago. This is primarily due to the advance in technology: Online dating. Pornography. Constant scrolling through content designed to show you that other people are living dramatically better lives than you are, you failure. If you’re a twentysomething living at home with your parents, you’re probably less affected by Government policy than you are by the sight of some influencer on TikTok or Instagram living it up in the Bahamas while you look out at the rain in Carlow.
Twenty years ago, those people were remote and in magazines or occasional TV documentaries, presented to us as the exception to the rule. Today, they’re a constant on the screen in your pocket, and present themselves as people who’ve achieved something perfectly normal. That’s a huge cultural shift in the expectations placed on young people.
Nor can this discussion be divorced, I think, from another trend: Much smarter writers than I have written at length about how a growing number of young women in particular appear to be seeking an “opt-out” from womanhood by embracing a transgender identity. Indeed, in this survey, young women are much more likely than young men to express deep feelings of discontent and dissatisfaction.
Are young women really more worried about incomes, housing, and, eh, rural public transport than young men are? Logic would dictate that the answer to that is “no”. Which leaves us with non-economic factors.
If anything, one might think those figures would be reversed if economic considerations were the main driver of unhappiness. For centuries now, in a way that is deeply culturally engrained even to this day in the minds of young men, male success was more deeply tied to economic achievement than female success was. In the mating marketplace, western society through decades, if not centuries, of cultural output – books, movies, advertising – has tied male attractiveness to material things like watches and cars and houses, and female success to beauty and desirability. That may not be how it should be, but it very much is how it has been. It follows logically that a decline in economic opportunities should impact men more than it impacts women. Yet that’s not what we see: We see the reverse.
All of this suggests to me at least that it is something in our culture that is disproportionately affecting women and girls. My theory – and it is only a theory, though I think a good one – is that this relates to the vastly different social and sexual expectations placed on young women in 2024 as opposed to in 1924, or even 1992, while the social and sexual expectations placed on young men have barely changed at all.
Centuries of western culture have depicted young men as essentially lascivious, libidinous beings whose role it is to tempt young women into dalliances of ill-repute. It is only in recent times that the culture has shifted in a way that says young women are expected not only to enthusiastically jump into said dalliances, but to measure themselves against surgically enhanced influencers and implausibly acrobatic adult actresses. They are also expected to find all of this enjoyable and liberating, while agreeing to postpone marriage and a family to their mid thirties or later because they are also expected to be girlboss career women as well as the kind of gal who would be comfortable gossiping with Miranda and Carrie about their latest conquest on Sex and the City.
In other words, the role of a young woman has transformed immeasurably. The role of a young man has broadly stayed the same. Who’s the real winner, in this environment, from feminism?
As for the lads, of course, it’s not entirely true that the expectations placed upon them have stayed entirely the same. The issue is that the changes expected of them are almost entirely cosmetic, and an inch deep: Be sensitive. Cry more. Be a feminist. Be progressive. Be compassionate.
All of these things, it should be said, can be faked: And what’s more, they very often are faked. It is the women, not unlike the corrupted young debutantes of 1924 who fell for a rake, who suffer the consequences.
If I’m right, then the NYCI won’t see much of an improvement in these figures by adding new bus routes between Kilmallock and Moate. But they are, of course, welcome to seek those things anyway.